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4.03 AVERAGE
4.03 AVERAGE
This book made me overwhelmingly sad and overwhelmingly happy at all once.
This book wasn't what I expected, but that's okay. Part of Miranda July's appeal, I think, is that you have to follow her thought process wherever it goes. Sometimes it's uncomfortable or gross or sad, but I think these things make the end discovery (wherever it is that you wind up) that much more beautiful. Her work feels very stream of consciousness, and I think that's what makes it so visceral. You have to follow along, and it often isn't going where you think.
This book isn't for everyone. Miranda July isn't for everyone. But her work is among my favorite, and I'm regretting not finding her sooner.
This book wasn't what I expected, but that's okay. Part of Miranda July's appeal, I think, is that you have to follow her thought process wherever it goes. Sometimes it's uncomfortable or gross or sad, but I think these things make the end discovery (wherever it is that you wind up) that much more beautiful. Her work feels very stream of consciousness, and I think that's what makes it so visceral. You have to follow along, and it often isn't going where you think.
This book isn't for everyone. Miranda July isn't for everyone. But her work is among my favorite, and I'm regretting not finding her sooner.
Didn't finish. I found most of the people she interviews to be really interesting, but I kept feeling like she was looking down on all of them or presenting them for ridicule, which I found really offputting. Particularly when she stresses the fact that they're all low income and in need of money, when she herself opens of the book by talking about how for the first few years that she was living with her boyfriend (husband?) she actually continued to pay rent on the apartment she had been living in when she was single, implying she herself is not hard up for money. Also, her struggles about writing her screenplay were not that interesting to me and I would have preferred the entire book just be the stories of the people she interviewed.
Formatting was great with pictures and word-for-word interview text and then personal revelations/commentary. The concept of "using" the people as a writer's block escape gets me a little (I know they were paid, but definitely some economic class/race stuff there)
The worthwhile parts of this book for me were the odd little turns of phrase that reveal July's unique perspective on contemporary life. Also interesting were the glimpses into the quirky, sad, humdrum, vaguely threatening lives of some of her interview subjects. Strongest of all was the interview in the last chapter with the iconoclastic elderly limerick writer who became a cast member in July's film, "The Future." His story, his 62-year marriage, his devotion to his "muse" of a wife, his illness, his many, many dearly departed pets and the ways in which he memorializes them, was freshly portrayed and very touching.
I haven't seen any of Miranda July's movies or other creations, but I saw this book on some friends' Goodreads and became intrigued. As she struggled to finish her screenplay for the film The Future, Miranda procrastinated by interviewing people who'd placed ads selling things in the Los Angeles PennySaver circular, and the book includes these transcripts (and well-placed photographs by Brigitte Sire that often have comedic or poignant timing), as well as some biographical interludes about Miranda herself. I'm glad I picked it up, because what it said about the creative process, the distraction/isolation of the internet, and the pursuit of couplehood and familyhood really resonated with me. Plus, Miranda July is my doppelganger, so it all fits. ;)
So many favorite quotes:
"I wrote it at the kitchen table, or in my old bed with its thrift-store sheets. Or, as anyone who has tried to write anything recently knows, these are the places where I set the stage for writing but instead looked things up online...I was jealous of older writers who had gotten more of a toehold on their discipline before the web came."
"I knew that in the end of the movie he would realize he was selling trees not because he thought it would help anything -- he actually felt it was much too late for that -- but because he loved this place, Earth. It was an act of devotion. A little like writing or loving someone -- it doesn't always feel worthwhile, but not giving up somehow creates unexpected meaning over time."
"I touched its leather and immediately got a head-rush. This sometimes happens when I'm faced with actualities -- it's like deja vu, but instead of the sensation that this has happened before, I'm suffused with the awareness that this is happening for the first time, that all the other times were in my head."
"LA isn't a walking city, or a subway city, so if someone isn't in my house or my car we'll never be together, not even for a moment. And just to be absolutely sure of that, when I leave my car my iPhone escorts me, letting everyone else in the post office know that I'm not really with them, I'm with my own people, who are so hilarious that I can't help smiling to myself as I text them back."
"For a moment I could feel time the way he felt it -- it was endless. It didn't really matter that his dreams of wildlife were in the opposite direction from the airplane hangar where he was headed, because there was time for multiple lives. Everything could still happen, so no decision could be very wrong.
That was exactly the opposite of how I was feeling now, at thirty-five...There wasn't time to make mistakes anymore, or to do things without knowing why."
"I've been trying for so long now, for decades, to lift the lid a little bit, to see under the edge of life and somehow catch it in the act -- 'it' being not God (because the word God asks a question and then answers it before there is any chance to wonder) but something along those lines."
"She'd invented all kinds of happiness for these people who seemed boring to me, while her immigrant story struck me as inherently poignant and profound. And probably neither one of us was entirely wrong; it's just that we were, more than anything, sick of our own problems."
"If I'd been Sophie, my character in the movie, I would have had an affair at this point. Not out of passion, but simply to hand myself over to someone else, like a child. But even in the movie this doesn't really work out."
"All I ever really want to know is how other people are making it through life -- where do they put their body, hour by hour, and how do they cope inside of it."
[about calendars] "We all laid our intricately handwritten lives across the grid and then put it on the wall for everyone to see. For a split second I could feel the way things were, the way time itself used to feel, before computers."
(p. 160-161) "I doggedly asked each PennySaver user if they used a computer. They mostly didn't...I feared that the scope of what I could feel and imagine was being quietly limited by the world within a world, the internet. The things outside the web were becoming further from me, and everything inside it seemed piercingly relevant. The blogs of strangers had to be read daily, and people nearby who had no web presence were becoming almost cartoonlike, as if they were missing a dimension.
I don't mean that I really thought this, out loud; it was just happening, like time, like geography. The web seemed so inherently endless that it didn't occur to me what wasn't there. My appetite for pictures and video and news and music was so gigantic now that if something was shrinking, something immeasurable, how would I notice? It's not that my life before the internet was so wildly diverse -- but there was only one world and it really did have every single thing in it. Domingo's blog was one of the best I've ever read, but I had to drive to him to get to it, he had to tell me with his whole self, and there was no easy way to search for him. He could only be found accidentally.
Scientifically, my interviews were pretty feeble...but one day soon there would be no more computerless people in Los Angeles and this exercise wouldn't be possible. Most of life is offline, and I think it always will be; eating and aching and sleeping and loving happen in the body. But it's not impossible to imagine losing my appetite for those things; they aren't always easy, and they take so much time. In twenty years I'd be interviewing air and water and heat just to remember they mattered."
"I sensed he'd been making his way through his to-do list for eighty-one years, and he was always behind, and this made everything urgent and bright, even now, especially now. How strange to cross paths with someone for the first time right before they were gone."
"I thought about his sixty-two years of sweet, filthy cards and something unspooled in my chest. Maybe I had miscalculated what was left of my life. Maybe it wasn't loose change. Or, actually, the whole thing was loose change, from start to finish -- many, many little moments, each holiday, each Valentine, each year unbearably repetitive and yet somehow always new. You could never buy anything with it, you could never cash it in for something more valuable or more whole. It was just all these days, held together by the fragile memory of one person -- or, if you were lucky, two. And because of this, this lack of inherent meaning or value, it was stunning. Like the most intricate, radical piece of art, the kind of art I was always trying to make. It dared to mean nothing and so demanded everything of you."
p. 216 "It almost hurt, remembering that Joe and Carolyn were a part of the world, surrounded by an infinite number of simultaneous stories. I suppose this was one reason why people got married, to make a fiction that was tellable. It wasn't just movies that couldn't contain the full cast of characters -- it was us. We had to winnow life down so we knew were to put our tenderness and attention; and that was a good, sweet thing. But together or alone, we were still embedded in a kaleidoscope, ruthlessly varied and continuous, until the end of the end. I knew I would forget this within the hour, and then remember, and forget, and remember. Each time I remembered it would be a tiny miracle, and forgetting was just as important -- I had to believe in my own story. Perhaps I wouldn't live out my last days alone in my office, drinking soup and wearing black. Maybe I would live without him among the things we had made together. Not without sadness, but not only tragically."
So many favorite quotes:
"I wrote it at the kitchen table, or in my old bed with its thrift-store sheets. Or, as anyone who has tried to write anything recently knows, these are the places where I set the stage for writing but instead looked things up online...I was jealous of older writers who had gotten more of a toehold on their discipline before the web came."
"I knew that in the end of the movie he would realize he was selling trees not because he thought it would help anything -- he actually felt it was much too late for that -- but because he loved this place, Earth. It was an act of devotion. A little like writing or loving someone -- it doesn't always feel worthwhile, but not giving up somehow creates unexpected meaning over time."
"I touched its leather and immediately got a head-rush. This sometimes happens when I'm faced with actualities -- it's like deja vu, but instead of the sensation that this has happened before, I'm suffused with the awareness that this is happening for the first time, that all the other times were in my head."
"LA isn't a walking city, or a subway city, so if someone isn't in my house or my car we'll never be together, not even for a moment. And just to be absolutely sure of that, when I leave my car my iPhone escorts me, letting everyone else in the post office know that I'm not really with them, I'm with my own people, who are so hilarious that I can't help smiling to myself as I text them back."
"For a moment I could feel time the way he felt it -- it was endless. It didn't really matter that his dreams of wildlife were in the opposite direction from the airplane hangar where he was headed, because there was time for multiple lives. Everything could still happen, so no decision could be very wrong.
That was exactly the opposite of how I was feeling now, at thirty-five...There wasn't time to make mistakes anymore, or to do things without knowing why."
"I've been trying for so long now, for decades, to lift the lid a little bit, to see under the edge of life and somehow catch it in the act -- 'it' being not God (because the word God asks a question and then answers it before there is any chance to wonder) but something along those lines."
"She'd invented all kinds of happiness for these people who seemed boring to me, while her immigrant story struck me as inherently poignant and profound. And probably neither one of us was entirely wrong; it's just that we were, more than anything, sick of our own problems."
"If I'd been Sophie, my character in the movie, I would have had an affair at this point. Not out of passion, but simply to hand myself over to someone else, like a child. But even in the movie this doesn't really work out."
"All I ever really want to know is how other people are making it through life -- where do they put their body, hour by hour, and how do they cope inside of it."
[about calendars] "We all laid our intricately handwritten lives across the grid and then put it on the wall for everyone to see. For a split second I could feel the way things were, the way time itself used to feel, before computers."
(p. 160-161) "I doggedly asked each PennySaver user if they used a computer. They mostly didn't...I feared that the scope of what I could feel and imagine was being quietly limited by the world within a world, the internet. The things outside the web were becoming further from me, and everything inside it seemed piercingly relevant. The blogs of strangers had to be read daily, and people nearby who had no web presence were becoming almost cartoonlike, as if they were missing a dimension.
I don't mean that I really thought this, out loud; it was just happening, like time, like geography. The web seemed so inherently endless that it didn't occur to me what wasn't there. My appetite for pictures and video and news and music was so gigantic now that if something was shrinking, something immeasurable, how would I notice? It's not that my life before the internet was so wildly diverse -- but there was only one world and it really did have every single thing in it. Domingo's blog was one of the best I've ever read, but I had to drive to him to get to it, he had to tell me with his whole self, and there was no easy way to search for him. He could only be found accidentally.
Scientifically, my interviews were pretty feeble...but one day soon there would be no more computerless people in Los Angeles and this exercise wouldn't be possible. Most of life is offline, and I think it always will be; eating and aching and sleeping and loving happen in the body. But it's not impossible to imagine losing my appetite for those things; they aren't always easy, and they take so much time. In twenty years I'd be interviewing air and water and heat just to remember they mattered."
"I sensed he'd been making his way through his to-do list for eighty-one years, and he was always behind, and this made everything urgent and bright, even now, especially now. How strange to cross paths with someone for the first time right before they were gone."
"I thought about his sixty-two years of sweet, filthy cards and something unspooled in my chest. Maybe I had miscalculated what was left of my life. Maybe it wasn't loose change. Or, actually, the whole thing was loose change, from start to finish -- many, many little moments, each holiday, each Valentine, each year unbearably repetitive and yet somehow always new. You could never buy anything with it, you could never cash it in for something more valuable or more whole. It was just all these days, held together by the fragile memory of one person -- or, if you were lucky, two. And because of this, this lack of inherent meaning or value, it was stunning. Like the most intricate, radical piece of art, the kind of art I was always trying to make. It dared to mean nothing and so demanded everything of you."
p. 216 "It almost hurt, remembering that Joe and Carolyn were a part of the world, surrounded by an infinite number of simultaneous stories. I suppose this was one reason why people got married, to make a fiction that was tellable. It wasn't just movies that couldn't contain the full cast of characters -- it was us. We had to winnow life down so we knew were to put our tenderness and attention; and that was a good, sweet thing. But together or alone, we were still embedded in a kaleidoscope, ruthlessly varied and continuous, until the end of the end. I knew I would forget this within the hour, and then remember, and forget, and remember. Each time I remembered it would be a tiny miracle, and forgetting was just as important -- I had to believe in my own story. Perhaps I wouldn't live out my last days alone in my office, drinking soup and wearing black. Maybe I would live without him among the things we had made together. Not without sadness, but not only tragically."
Reading Miranda July always makes me feel slightly less alone in the universe. This is a beautiful slice-of-life collection that accomplishes, I believe, two separate, hopeful things. First, it tells the story of just people. People living and working and doing things they do, that are not on Facebook or any other kind of "Photoshopped" digital reality. Second, it allows us to peer into her own creative mind as she goes through the faith-and-doubt dichotomy that comes with any act of making. I loved both aspects, and cried all during the final chapter. This was great.
emotional
funny
I believe that upon finishing this one, I’ve read every one of July’s books, and I’m surprised that this one doesn’t rank higher in people’s minds.
A series of interviews with people that July discovers via LA PennySaver ads, this book seems to explore the fundamental curiosity in people that her work is based on. Her reflections on the (notably computer-resistant or computer illiterate) characters she meets forces the reader to confront their own curiosity which can sometimes veer into voyeurism, but I believe is fundamentally based in an empathy and a curiosity around what people are struggling with and how they cope.
Maybe this is a fundamentally selfish question - to know the strangeness of your neighbor creates a sort of solidarity in isolation. I’m left reflecting on the fact that we’re all facing unique struggles, often on our own, but that breeds its own community.
Also an interesting meditation on the privilege of the artist/narrator. July has been poor and has worked odd jobs, but is now in a position to interview others about their odd jobs and receive financial reward and artistic recognition for telling those stories - a conflict she herself confronts within the book.
More heartwarming (and more challenging) than expected.
I love people.
A series of interviews with people that July discovers via LA PennySaver ads, this book seems to explore the fundamental curiosity in people that her work is based on. Her reflections on the (notably computer-resistant or computer illiterate) characters she meets forces the reader to confront their own curiosity which can sometimes veer into voyeurism, but I believe is fundamentally based in an empathy and a curiosity around what people are struggling with and how they cope.
Maybe this is a fundamentally selfish question - to know the strangeness of your neighbor creates a sort of solidarity in isolation. I’m left reflecting on the fact that we’re all facing unique struggles, often on our own, but that breeds its own community.
Also an interesting meditation on the privilege of the artist/narrator. July has been poor and has worked odd jobs, but is now in a position to interview others about their odd jobs and receive financial reward and artistic recognition for telling those stories - a conflict she herself confronts within the book.
More heartwarming (and more challenging) than expected.
I love people.
I read this book in about three hours, in one sitting. That might even be slow for its length (short), type (largeish) and smattering of photos, but the point is this: It kept my attention, was simply but interestingly written, and held some interesting, possibly universal, observations about life, or at least life for a 30-something artist-writer-type, which I could identify with in one way or another.
While working on her screenplay, somewhat taken from her life experiences, Miranda July takes a bit of a side-trip through the Pennysaver to drop in on the classified writers' lives, and finds a life lesson and the solution to her writers' block. She's trying, in her screenplay and I suppose in this book, to wrap some universal thoughts about life at this time into something that doesn't seem contrived. "It Chooses You" very well could have been... but it felt genuine and human.
I can't wait to see the associated film, as this is as much a behind-the-scenes-of-a-writer-filmmaker as it is a story in its own right.
Five stars - and I rarely give those - because of the surprisingly cliche-free writing, the interesting subject, and the emotional appeal.
While working on her screenplay, somewhat taken from her life experiences, Miranda July takes a bit of a side-trip through the Pennysaver to drop in on the classified writers' lives, and finds a life lesson and the solution to her writers' block. She's trying, in her screenplay and I suppose in this book, to wrap some universal thoughts about life at this time into something that doesn't seem contrived. "It Chooses You" very well could have been... but it felt genuine and human.
I can't wait to see the associated film, as this is as much a behind-the-scenes-of-a-writer-filmmaker as it is a story in its own right.
Five stars - and I rarely give those - because of the surprisingly cliche-free writing, the interesting subject, and the emotional appeal.
Miranda July can do no wrong.
This book is a catalogue of a side project that Miranda July worked on while she was trying to overcome her writer's block while writing the screenplay for The Future. It's witty, touching, characteristically L.A., and full of innocence and wonder.
p.s. this book is not for everyone, and if you don't know who Miranda July is then you might be surprised in a turned-off way. But anyways, I think she's a genius and everything she makes is amazing.
This book is a catalogue of a side project that Miranda July worked on while she was trying to overcome her writer's block while writing the screenplay for The Future. It's witty, touching, characteristically L.A., and full of innocence and wonder.
p.s. this book is not for everyone, and if you don't know who Miranda July is then you might be surprised in a turned-off way. But anyways, I think she's a genius and everything she makes is amazing.
adventurous
emotional
fast-paced